Organizations are increasingly operating in a geographically dispersed environment. As this trend continues, it is increasingly important to have effective “distributed project management” (i.e., project management processes and technologies that support individuals and teams that span multiple physical locations). To work effectively and decisively as a team, there must be effective communication and collaboration between the individual personnel/team members. Face-to-face meetings among team members have been the traditional manner of communicating. But, with geographically dispersed teams, face-to-face meetings are typically difficult to schedule, require travel time, and are expensive.
To improve the process, facilitators (i.e., a person designated to organize and monitor meetings), are sometimes used to enhance the efficiency of the face-to-face meetings. While improving the efficiency of the face-to-face meeting, the facilitator's dedicated time is an additional cost.
Video conferencing can be used to have remote face-to-face meetings. Video conferencing saves travel time and cost, but all parties must be available at the same time at a facility with the requisite equipment. So, even though the traveling is reduced or eliminated, the inefficiency and difficulty in scheduling remain the same.
With the advent of wide area computer networks, such as the Internet, less expensive communications have become possible for distributed project management. Besides being less expensive, computer network communications allow for two forms of communications: synchronous and asynchronous.
An example of synchronous or ‘live’ computer network communications is web conferencing, where all the team members having a computer attached to the computer network can take part in the discussion without travel, but must be on-line at the same time and are not as convenient as email since the team members must be at their computers during the conference and a record of the conversation is generally not saved. Asynchronous communications, which is more time flexible for the team members, includes instant massaging, document storage and sharing, group e-mail, message boards, and instant printing. The asynchronous forms of computer network communications may or may not store transactions occurring during the meeting.
Furthermore, the asynchronous forms of network communications tend to be become unfocused due to a lack of structure. For example, e-mails, which are quick and inexpensive, may get intermingled with e-mails pertaining to non-team matters and tend to proliferate. Conversation threads in these e-mails can be severed in the event a team member accidently sends a “reply” rather than a “reply to all” when participating in a collaborative email discussion. Message boards provide another example where the lack of structure and lack of discipline of team members may lead to the discussion's becoming unfocused.
Thus far, there has not been an effective bridge of the gap between technology and human interaction in distributed project management.